Trudeau stumbled through 2017. Apparently, no one noticed.

First term majority governments nearly always win second terms in Canada — the sole exceptions being Alexander Mackenzie losing to Sir John A. Macdonald in 1878, and R.B. Bennett being defeated by W.L. Mackenzie King in 1935.

One majority government came perilously close to losing after its first term in office — Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s, re-elected in 1972 with 109 seats to 107 for the Progressive Conservatives under Robert Stanfield. The New Democrats under David Lewis held the balance of power with 31 seats in a 264-seat House. The Créditistes won 15 seats in Quebec, where former Conservative Roch LaSalle was elected as an independent; he later rejoined the Tories.

It doesn’t get any closer than that. With a big lead in the polls going into the election, the Liberals nearly lost that year because they ran a lousy campaign typified by an infamously complacent slogan: ‘The Land is Strong.’

For the most part, from Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier down to Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien, first term majority governments have been granted second majority mandates by Canadian voters.

Justin Trudeau will be bidding to follow in those majority footsteps in 2019. According to recent polls, he’s in the zone now.

CBC puts the odds of a Liberal majority at 85 per cent and in landslide territory — 200 seats in the 338-seat House. That’s certainly where the Nanos numbers would come out in terms of seats; the Liberals could even surpass the 211-seat sweep by Mulroney in 1984 in the then-282 seat House.

There’s no mystery to it. The Liberals are riding high on a strong economy which has created 400,000 new jobs in 2017 — 600,000 since they took office two years ago. Unemployment, at 5.9 per cent, is the lowest it’s been since 2008. Inflation is averaging 1.5 per cent, well within the Bank of Canada’s target range of 2 per cent.

All of which has allowed the Bank to maintain its overnight target rate of 1 per cent, even as the Federal Reserve in the U.S. has increased the fed funds rate three times this year to a target rate of 1.25 to 1.50 per cent. This means money will remain cheap into 2018. If you’re middle class or “working hard to join it,” an affordable prime rate should improve your mood as a voter.

Meanwhile, the stock market is on fire — both the TSX and the Dow closed at record highs Monday, the TSX over 16,100 and the Dow near 24,800. The Dow is up 5,000 points since Donald Trump took office in January — the biggest one-year increase in history.

Again, no mystery here: Wall Street likes Trump’s tax-cut plan, set to pass Congress this week, under which the corporate tax rate would fall from 35 to 21 per cent. The U.S. unemployment rate — 4.1 per cent, down half a point since last November’s election — is the lowest since 2000. The buoyant U.S. economy and booming stock market are obviously positive indicators for the Canadian economy as well.

‘The land is strong’, in other words.

Odds are the Liberals will be re-elected with a second majority. But they need to guard against hubris and remember how they very nearly lost in 1972 to Bob Stanfield, the least charismatic Conservative leader of the modern era.

Which is not to say the Liberals and Trudeau aren’t suffering from the mid-term muddle that afflicts most governments in their first mandate.

The Liberals got mauled in question period during the fall sitting of the House — and it had no lasting impact on their lead in the polls. A handful of ministers have underperformed (that’s putting it kindly) and normally would expect to be moved or demoted in a cabinet shuffle next spring or summer.

Trudeau will have to decide whether to stick with Bill Morneau as finance minister or move him out after his next budget in March or April. A bungled tax reform file, to say nothing of conflicts of interest between his current job and his family HR firm, are reasons enough to broom him.

Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly rolled out a cultural and media funding review that badly misjudged the mood of her own province of Quebec. With $500 million in funding for Canadian Netflix production in English, and only $50 million for French content, it’s no wonder francophone stakeholders went ballistic. (Joly also wears the controversy over that $7.5 million temporary hockey rink on the Hill.)

Diane Lebouthillier has the misfortune of presiding over the worst department in the government, the Canada Revenue Agency, which doesn’t even answer the phone 30 per cent of the time. And Minister for Disabled Persons Kent Hehr has an unfortunate habit of insulting people asking him for help.

And as the Prime Minister’s Office reviews 2017, the PM’s staff should ask themselves how they managed to bungle two major trade files in Asia — the revamped Trans Pacific Partnership deal and bilateral trade talks with China. In the first instance, Trudeau failed to show up for a TPP signing that was to have been presided over by Shinzo Abe, forcing the Japanese prime minister — of all the people in the world — to lose face.

In the second, the PMO failed to manage expectations by permitting speculation that a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang would result in an announcement about trade talks, which never happened.

In fairness, Trudeau’s people have done a superb job of managing the NAFTA renegotiation launch with Trump, though that could still come to nothing as well (through no fault of their own).

Looking ahead to 2018, the PMO should be focusing on deliverables, such as partnerships with the private sector for the new Canada Infrastructure Bank. Trudeau also will be hosting a G7 summit in Quebec next June and Canada is set to play host to the Fortune Global Forum, a prestigious business summit second only to Davos in importance in the business world.

Trudeau himself is clearly itching to get out there again. On Tuesday morning he told his friend Terry DiMonte, a Montreal radio host, that he would be doing another town hall tour in January in an attempt to avoid “government-itis.”

I know something about that, having worked in Mulroney’s office during his own mid-term muddle, which included the resignation of Fisheries Minister John Fraser in September 1985 over what the media insisted on calling ‘Tunagate’. (It was a long time ago. Look it up.) When Mulroney attended a Blue Jays baseball game in Toronto that fall, fans howled “Tuna! Tuna!” He pretended not to hear.

Later, chatting with friends at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, he admitted his government had lost a step. “We’re on a bad roll,” he said. “We’ll be on a bad roll until Christmas.” So he was, and for quite some time after that — before he turned things around to win the free trade election of 1988.

Odds are the Liberals will be re-elected with a second majority. But they need to guard against hubris and remember how they very nearly lost in 1972 to Bob Stanfield, the least charismatic Conservative leader of the modern era.

Which is also something for Andrew Scheer to consider.

Merry Christmas.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.